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A Question of Choice

by Glyn Moody

on October 17, 2006

Choice: it's one of the key ideas at the heart of free software. The
right to choose how to use your software, the right to choose who you share it
with. Who could be against choice? Certainly not the
Initiative
for Software Choice, except that it has a slightly different view of what
choice implies:

To encourage continued software innovation and promote broad choice,
governments are encouraged to consider the following neutral principles:

Procure software on its merits, not through categorical preferences

Promote broad availability of government funded research

Promote interoperability through platform-neutral standards

Maintain a choice of strong intellectual property protections

But wait a minute: "maintain a choice of strong intellectual property
protections" - that's not quite a neutral principle, is it? It rather
begs the question whether intellectual property is really a good idea.
In Europe, for example, there are still lively discussions going on about
whether such intellectual monopolies should apply to "software innovation" at
all.

So let's look a little closer at this Initiative for Software Choice. It certainly has an
impressive list of members - hundreds of them. They mostly seem to be
small companies, and nothing wrong with that. But wait, there are couple
of bigger fish among the minnows: EDS is there, and a certain outfit called
Microsoft. And investigating a little further, in the great memory
bucket that is Google we find this interesting
article
in The Register from 2002, by Bruce Perens, in which he reveals that the
Initiative for Software Choice owes its origins not only to Microsoft, but
also to Peru:

Microsoft is worried about Peruvian Congressman Edgar
Villanueva's proposal
for his nation's government agencies to standardize on Free Software for their
own internal use. ... Microsoft has responded with a
clever Software
Choice campaign that, read quickly, appears to fight discrimination and
call for choice, while actually promoting policies that would lock out Free
Software.

This information is particularly interesting in the context of a letter that
is starting to
pop
up across the Internet. It was sent on 10 October from Hugo Lueders,
Director of the Initiative for Software Choice Europe, to Françoise Le Bail,
Deputy Director-General for the European Commission's Directorate-General
Enterprise and Industry, and copied to three other senior EU figures.
The letter comments on a draft version of a study carried out by
UNU-MERIT on
behalf of the EU on "The impact of Free/Libre/Open Source Software on
innovation and competitiveness of the European Union". A related
workshop on the topic
was held recently.

The letter seems to be an attempt to blunt some of the impact of this study,
which presumably comments positively on the state and potential of free
software in Europe, and recommends its wider promotion and deployment
there. Mr Lueders plays his main card right from the start:

It must be reiterated that FLOSS is merely a business model for distributing
software, just like many other software business models including hybrid and
proprietary software.

This is a clever gambit. By reducing free software to "merely a business
model" it tries to short-circuit all discussions about the other, non-economic
benefits that open source offers. For example, free software creates a
digital commons, owned by none but from which all can benefit. Free
software puts the user firmly back in control: there is no vendor lock-in as
with proprietary products. Often there are several suppliers of similar
products (as in the GNU/Linux market) or several completely different but
compatible solutions (as with the office suites that support ODF). But
these are aspects that the Initiative for Software Choice wants to avoid
discussing, because closed source software is the equivalent of enclosing the
digital commons, not extending it, and its business model is to make it as
hard as possible to leave for those that pay for the privilege of using some fenced-off
resource.

the proprietary model is supported to a large extent by a complex system of
rights (i.e. IPR) that has spawned from societal experiences to provide
incentives for innovative technological progress. This system remains
valid of its own right; it is an intricate and market-oriented stimulant of innovation that
clearly works. ... IPR fosters and protects innovation - that cannot be
denied."

This is the line routinely taken by fans of IPR, but there is plenty of
evidence that IPR neither fosters nor protects. For intellectual
property is not about property at all: it is about a government-granted
intellectual monopoly. And monopolies are bad - "that cannot be denied"
as Mr Lueders might say. If you want to understand why, read the
brilliant book
"Against
Intellectual Monopoly" by Michelle Boldrin and David K. Levine, freely
available online.

The overall thrust of the letter (and of the Initiative for Software Choice's campaigns)
boils down to the idea that choosing to give preferential treatment to open
source is somehow discriminatory and wrong, just as Microsoft's Software Choice
campaign claimed back in 2002. But as Rob Weir points out in a wise
posting
on the subject of choice:

The fact is that every decision, ever[y] choice you make, commits you and
eliminates some other choices. We choose because without choosing we cannot
claim the value in a single path among alternatives.

In other words, choosing to support free software is not a neutral act, and
should not be judged as such: it is a conscious selection of the solution that
is deemed to be better. The
Initiative for Software Choice, by contrast, wants to deny governments the
option of choosing to encourage such solutions, forcing them instead to
support business models that inherently limit their freedom.

This is similar to the pro-smoking lobby's argument that the government should
not try to prevent people from taking up smoking because it would restrict
their ability to choose, as if smoking and not smoking were abstract,
equivalent states. But they are not: smoking harms the smoker directly
and society indirectly in many ways. When governments choose to
discourage smoking they are doing so because they want to intervene to protect
the smoker and reduce social costs. Similarly, when governments choose
to promote free software, it is with the aim of guiding their departments
towards solutions that are better for them, and better for society as a whole.